Long-term president Alpha Condé was deposed in a military coup in Guinea, West Africa. The junta is now trying to consolidate its power. The opposition celebrates.
The leaders of a military coup in Guinea, West Africa, banned members of the government from leaving the country on Monday.
Cabinet members who were convened the day after President Alpha Condé was ousted should hand in their passports and official vehicles, the leader of the coup, Mamady Doumbouya, said in the capital, Conakry.
Doumbouya, the commander of an elite military unit created by Condé, also lifted an air traffic stop imposed on Sunday and a curfew in mining areas. Guinea is one of the world’s largest suppliers of bauxite, an ore used to make aluminum. The country with around 13 million inhabitants, which is roughly the size of Great Britain and borders the Atlantic Ocean in the west of the continent, supplies all major world markets, with China one of its largest customers.
Following the meeting, Doumbouya drove in a military convoy to the Siruté central prison in the capital and arranged for four opposition politicians to be released, as a local dpa reporter reported. “The others will be liberated later,” said the coup leader, referring to the thousands of opposition members who had been arrested under President Condé.
Hundreds of supporters of the opposition celebrated the fall of Condé in the streets of the capital. People danced on the roadside, held their fists in the air as a sign of victory and played horn concerts to express their joy and hope for a new beginning.
The whereabouts of the deposed president remained unclear on Monday. According to military sources, Condé is said to be under house arrest in a hotel in Conakry. The United Nations, European Union, United States and Russia have condemned the coup.
Condé came to power in 2010 in the first free democratic election since Guinea’s independence in 1958. Reforms in the economy and in the military are ascribed to him, and after politically turbulent decades he also ensured more stability. Critics, however, see Condé as an increasingly authoritarian ruler whose term of office was marked by human rights violations. Last year he secured a third term in office after a controversial constitutional amendment. The vote was preceded by months of political tension and violent and brutally suppressed protests, in which dozens were killed.
The coup had turned a decade of political stability on its head and was undoubtedly inspired by the revolts in neighboring Mali in May 2021 and August 2020, said Eric Humphery-Smith, Africa expert at security consultancy Verisk Maplecroft. For the global bauxite market, Humphery-Smith predicted “a significant supply disruption” for the next few days, if not weeks.
In Africa there are frequent changes of government through military coups. In Mali, where the Bundeswehr is deployed as part of a UN peacekeeping mission, the military ousted President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita in August 2020. Nine months later, the putschists also forced the interim president to resign. In 2019, autocrat Omar al-Bashir was deposed from the military in Sudan. The same fate befell President Robert Mugabe in 2017 in Zimbabwe and President François Bozizé in 2013 in the Central African Republic.
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